“Marion,” he said, turning to me, reaching for the old script. “You’re not thinking clearly. You’ve been fragile, you know you have, this is exactly the kind of paranoid—”
“Alan,” I said, in the operating-room voice. “Stop.
For seven years you told me to look in the mirror. So I did. And for a long time, I saw exactly what you wanted me to see — a broken woman who owed you everything for not leaving.
But I’m a trauma surgeon. I know the difference between a patient who’s dying and a patient who’s being slowly bled by someone who profits from the wound.
I wasn’t broken, Alan. I was being drained. By you. On purpose. Since the moment I started to heal and became a threat instead of an asset.
You didn’t stay with me out of love. You stayed because a grieving widow with a paid-off condo and a surgeon’s savings was worth more to you incapacitated than a healthy wife was worth to you free.
